I’m actually someone who dreads the idea that she’d have to live in one place for the rest of her life 🙂 I have a rather adventurous spirit and I love travelling. I adore airports and the feeling of going somewhere. I also have a curious mind.

If I would try to be something else and deny that part of me, it would cause me to become depressive. So I do honour that side of me, and embrace it.

That doesn’t mean though that I would have to be able to travel. You can honour the adventurous spirit with other ways as well. Life in general is one big adventure! There is so much to be seen and learned, even just at home, that it’s just amazing.

Finding happiness in being your authentic self does not have to be tied to external circumstances. Like your job. If you hate it because you feel like you can’t express yourself in it or it doesn’t speak to you in a particular way, then stop expecting it to 🙂 You need to adapt to your surroundings and express yourself the way you are able to in your current situation. That is not to say that you would have to stay in your current job. You don’t. But like with everything else, finding happiness comes from within and being too tied with the circumstances gives all that power away.

You can shine as an adventurous spirit even if you had to work a 9 to 5 job as a cashier in a local supermarket. You can also be completely lost and miserable even if you were able to travel anywhere you wanted to on a whim.

Hi Lizzie,

You might get some mental clarity if you tried to see all these things as separate from each other and not one big mess. Often when one thing starts to become overwhelming, then the capabilities to handle all the other stuff becomes impaired.

Also, when you look at things, there is the reality and then there is your perception of reality along with your attitude towards it.

As an example, you say that you have a job that you hate. If you wake up every morning thinking “I so do not want to go there”, it’s only going to make things that much more harder for you (that’s the attitude part). Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, and fighting against it will only add to the difficulty. In reality, there might not even be any difficulty if you looked at things from a different angle. But as long as you wish that the reality was something that it’s not, you’re going to feel miserable and anxious.

So, if you could try to entangle these things one by one, without thinking about the other parts, you might have a clearer picture of what it is that you truly want. Moving abroad to get away from a situation that seems overwhelming isn’t going to solve the situation. You would start a new life without solving the past issues, and that would leak over to the next phase as well. Your view of reality and your attitude towards it is going to follow you everywhere.

Part of the attitude can be letting go. It doesn’t have to mean ending things with a boyfriend or thinking that you’ll never travel abroad again. Letting go does not equal accepting some perpetual state, rather it allows the things to move towards where they ought to be moving. Now you’re kind of stuck, not wanting things and wishing for something else, but you’re still holding onto everything. When you mentally let go and allow things to be as they are and progress as they naturally would, you might find yourself exactly where you need to be. It’s scary to do that, because the future is unknown. Right now you might feel that you would never want to live without your boyfriend, but there is no saying that next year you wouldn’t be living with someone else and you’d think “wow, I never saw that coming”. Or, you decide to stay and you have a child together and you look back and think “wow, if I would’ve left I wouldn’t have all this right now”. Hindsight 20/20, but the point is that by letting go, you might get to where you truly want to be, even if you don’t know it yet. Right now you are seeing all the threats, but not the opportunities. It makes sense that you’d feel like that, but that’s not the whole truth.

I know that doesn’t exactly answer your question, but try to look at each thing as a separate entity and refine your attitude towards it by allowing it to be what it is. Not fighting against it.

I am pretty sure that you just said in your previous post that you are doing the other things suggested by people initially.

Also, as I said, people around the world manage to meditate in harsher conditions than where you live. So really, it is just an excuse not to.

Did I just accidentally report your post? I was looking at the Activity tab on my iPad and I swear I tapped on that link that shows more, but then it kind of disappeared and I came to this thread and it said that your post was reported. Then the whole post disappeared from the Activity feed and I had to come on my computer to see what was going on 🙂

Sorry, if it was me! Damn iPad + TinyBuddha combination…

Yes, I agree that “networking” sounds very professional.

I like long-distance friendships. Exchanging thoughts can be very rewarding. At least for me, as I’m more of a cerebral person.

Have you ever seen how children behave when they get upset? They throw themselves on the ground and start kicking and screaming and pushing away people who try to get her to get up and calm down. Then if people walk away and say “OK, well you let us know when you’re ready to get up”, she will start crying and getting overly dramatic claiming that nobody loves her and everyone abandons her. That is kind of the emotional state of mind that you are describing.

You are loved regardless of how you behave, but it would be much easier for your own sake to learn some humility and accept the love that is offered.

You have a bed of some sort? Time before sleep and time after sleep when it’s calm. There are people all around the world in much worse conditions that make the time to meditate because they have chosen to do so. It doesn’t have to be under ideal conditions.

Also, you may feel like this will be all your life, but you could allow your rational side to understand that it’s not going to be. You understand the concepts of time and effort. You went to University. You know that it took a while to graduate from it, and it didn’t happen the next day. So you may feel like it’s forever, but you can respond to that feeling by calming yourself down and telling yourself that it’s a false feeling.

It’s hard to know, even with experience. The ego can be sneaky. That’s why I personally think that it’s better to rely on common sense and rationality in decision making, instead of going with what ever the mind tells you at any given moment. On top of that there is the gut feeling, but that may or may not be clear. The feeling can not be explained, in my opinion.